Sunday, October 28, 2012

HOMO QUESTOR

Cats are curious, sometimes perilously. Dogs are curious, mainly about scents and intruders. All creatures are searchers, if only for food, shelter and mates.

But human beings might better be nominated Homo questor than Homo sapiens, since sapience is more our aspiration than a generic trait. Homo questor is the perennially seeking species, curious and inquisitive about all things great and small, deep and shallow.

That intelligence which affords us the power to develop languages thereby gives us the means to inquire, to articulate questions and develop answers to communicate to others.

So avid is our curiosity that we sometimes pose and ponder questions so perplexing that they have been dubbed enduring questions or perennial questions, to be revisited generation after generation, era after era: What is the meaning of life? Is there life after death? Does evolution have a goal? What is the Good Life?

One might even ask, “Why do we ask questions?” One answer is that we do so because we can, and we might assume that the universe has made us so that it can be conscious of itself.